


By Which To Measure

by hitlikehammers



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: (Except It's Not Too Late), Angst with a Happy Ending, Angsty Schmoop, Eggsy Finally Admits He's Got More Than A Crush On Harry Hart Once It's Too Late, Epiphanies, Fix-It, Fluff, Harry Hart Lives, M/M, Pillow Talk, Post V-Day, Romance, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 15:02:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5630911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“God,” Harry murmurs, straight up against Eggsy’s skin. “You're brilliant aren’t you, my darling. But you're really quite thick.” </p><p>And it ain’t an insult at all, somehow, for the way Harry says it, all marveling and wonder and all the things that are pointing the wrong way, just now: that are meant for Eggsy to turn toward <i>Harry</i>, not the other way ‘round.</p><p>“After everything, <i>everything</i>,” Harry strokes thumbprints up and down Eggsy’s cheeks as he pulls back and stares deep into him, through him right and true. “You still have no sense of your <i>worth</i>, do you?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Which To Measure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RC_McLachlan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RC_McLachlan/gifts).



> Something that got stuck in my head and wouldn't leave. [RC_McLachlan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/RC_McLachlan)'s original holiday ficlet, before she gave me a prompt, and I liked this one too. So, y'know. I finished it.
> 
> All my thanks and love to [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad) for reading this over <3

So, like, here's the thing: Eggsy’s right shit at dealing with the crash, with the let-down once the adrenaline pools in his heart and turns lead-like, leaves him hanging and sweating out of his fuckin’ pores and stings the backs of his eyes and what-the-fuck not. 

So when he's got a perfect, heart-curved arse waiting to help draw it all out a little longer, he's not fuckin’ stupid; he ain't got a death wish. He don't look no gift horse in its mouth. 

And so maybe he fucks her blindly, maybe he bites his tongue until it bleeds, maybe his eyes squeeze closed when she plays with his dick and if her lithe fucking fingers dance back to his hole and play there a bit too, well, then he can't fuckin’ help it if he gasps like burning and rolls hips relentless and moans, maybe, around the blood on his teeth. 

He keeps his eyes closed, too, as they catch their breaths on separate sides of the bed.

"Thought you might like that,” Tilde breathes out slow, small between the heaving of their chests. “Had a hunch."

And Eggsy’s got his own hunch, and it's tellin’ him in no uncertain terms that the minute he opens his eyes, it'll all come crashing down. 

So he doesn't really mean to do it, to invite the apocalypse he'd just stopped to come back for him and him alone: but it happens. 

He cracks open an eye; quirks a brow. Her breasts are swaying with the way she gulps a bit for air, even still.

‘Cause Eggsy’s a pretty good lay, y’know?

"Whatcha on about?" he asks, but it comes out hollow, because his mind’s already fucking gone, t’be honest. He’s not even entirely sure what she said, just that he doesn’t think he understood it quite right.

“You're lucky these walls are thick, you forget your mouth when,” she smirks, and her hand comes to lie across her nipples as she bites her lower lip, debating something. What she’ll say next.

What she decides on is short, and to the point, and that crash Eggsy’d been waiting on, been trying like hell to stave off just a little longer, just a little further, just—

"Harry is a lucky man." 

And the ‘walls are thick’; he ‘forgot his mouth’.

Fuck. _Fuck_.

God _damn_ it.

___________________________

Word to the wise: probably the worst place to come to the realisation that you’re arse over tits for your dead fucking mentor is with your dick out, in bed with a beautiful woman—and in the few moments where he can even fucking _think_ , he can acknowledge that yes, royal sex is a _thing_ —but yeah. In bed, with a beautiful _royal_ woman, who you called by a man’s name when you came.

Dick. Out.

Worst place to figure out that “crush” was a lie you were telling yourself too often in the first place, and you should have figured at least some of this shit out already—”crush” was not the right word.

Eggsy fucking knows what the right word is.

So it’s really for the best that there are private compartments on the jet. Merlin could come and find him, but, well. Eggsy was pretty fucking blind, and willfully so, maybe, so fuck off.

And so he’s pretty sure Merlin knows why he locks himself away for the whole the flight back.

He wonders how thick _these_ walls are. He forgets his mouth, sometimes. He comes loud, he knows that. Ain’t no shame there. Life’s too fucking short, ain’t that the truth.

But he’s an ugly fuckin’ crier, though. 

He sobs even louder.  
___________________________

And here’s the thing: Eggsy doesn’t like the crash. So the answer, in the absence of a real fuckin’ answer, is to avoid it entirely. 

So he takes every fucking assignment thrown at him, because Kingsman doesn’t have the luxury of debating his candidacy after V-Day, and he’s skilled, if green. He’s ballsy where experience fails him, though, and that counts for something. So Eggsy runs himself just this side of ragged, and sleeps when he’s not running, and he figures if he can outrun what it means to feel anything under the haze of exhaustion and the pump of the wild, searing fight in his veins, then he don’t have to think on it, then, does he?

It works, too. It works the way it needs to, and fuck what anyone else doesn’t say, won’t speak the words to his goddamn face. Fuck the way they look at him. Fuck ‘em all. 

As it happens, however, Eggsy never quite figures out if it’s something they’d known for a while already, and failed to let him in on—are there Kingsman clearance levels, like in spy movies, or like the Avengers and shit?—or maybe it’s just fucking coincidence that he’s laid up from a stupid fucking mistake that nearly put a bullet through his chest, and he’s right drugged up is what he is, and docile for it, loopy with it, when Merlin comes into his room, surveys his condition, and then clears his throat to tell him the sky’s fallen, the North Pole’s gone South for the winter, and Harry Hart is fucking alive.

Eggsy manages to raise two fingers in the air, though the ‘fuck off’ that’s meant to go along gets garbled around the dizzying pounding, the frantic beep of some godforsaken monitor at his side, before he promptly passes the fuck out.  
___________________________

When he surfaces again, he’s entirely convinced that it was a dream, or the drugs.

‘Cept he knows the hand near his own—not in it, but _near_ it—when his eyes focus and catch the wrist, the cufflinks. 

And there’s the pounding again, god _damnit_.

“Eggsy,” and oh, that voice, and the last time he’d heard it there’d been such anger, such disappointment, and here it’s everything he ever dared to want: concern and affection and relief and wonder and _oh_.

It has _got_ to be the drugs.

“Calm down, darling,” that voice is a soft hum, perfect in all respects, forever and for always, and that hand lifts from radiating warmth against Eggsy’s fingertips to splay against Eggsy’s brow, to stroke back his hair, and his heavy-thumping heart responds to the contact with a thought to spark it happening: soft, and slow, and rhythmic, and the beeping starts to match the cadence of that hand upon his skin.

“There you are.”

And Eggsy wants to speak, wants to maybe not speak and just take in that soft face, the new wrinkles, the shine of the scar at the temple: the quirk of those lips and the blink of the eyes and the way that body moves because it’s breathing, because living things needs air to survive.

 _Living_ things.

Eggsy wants to reach, to touch the rising-falling chest leaning close to him, near enough to brush against him except it doesn’t.

Eggsy wants to sob, but he’s an ugly fucking crier, and he’s loud with it.

The tears fall anyway.

And just the same, the words come. One in particular that wasn’t “crush”; was never fucking “crush.”

“I love you.”

Harry’s chest stills, and his breath stops, and Eggsy’s wall fall out from under him for just a second before Harry leans in, presses a kiss to the corner of Eggsy’s mouth and breathes, fucking _breaths_ :

“Rest now, my darling. Just rest.”

And Eggsy doesn’t have it in him to fight the pull that says the same.

___________________________

By the time Eggsy leaves the medical wing, he knows what Harry tastes like. He knows what joy sounds like in Harry’s voice. He knows the texture of Harry’s skin.

He leaves the hospital bed with his hand held in Harry’s, his fingers caught up in Harry’s own, and it’s not the drugs, but Eggsy’s still not entirely convinced it ain’t a dream.

___________________________

He still ain’t convinced weeks, months later; in Harry’s house.

In Harry’s bed.

In _their_ bed, he supposes. Probably? Like, common-law beds?

And it’d taken a good long while before he could even close his eyes without screaming them open again. It’d taken longer still for him to figure out what to do if he slid off, rolled away from the warmth of Harry’s chest in the night and couldn’t find the heavy-strong-steady thump of a heart so alive underneath his ear upon waking. 

It’s taken a good long while for a lot of things, basically, but Eggsy kinda figures it’s a hell of a lot less time than the always he’d been fearing, been weighed down under, been facing stretched out forever before him: the always without Harry that he thought he’d have to learn to breathe inside.

So he don’t care, much, really, that he’s here now, that he’s learned not to scream, sure, most nights, for Harry’s warmth beside him; and he’s learned to reach for Harry’s chest when he shifts in the dark if he needs to, and that’s exactly where his hand rests now; and if he spends more nights watching Harry as he sleeps than getting sleep himself, well, that’s fucking brilliant, s’what that is.

That’s all Eggsy can fucking ask the universe for, after the universe gave him back the man he loves, and more’n that: gave him the man he loves and then, more’n Eggsy’s ever earned; then it somehow tricked him into loving Eggsy back. 

Harry hums awake from a doze that Eggsy himself’s been fighting since their second go-about of the evening; stares a question into Eggsy’s eyes, wonders after what keeps him awake.

Eggsy can’t bring himself to lie.

“Jus’ can’t believe it.” And the beautiful thing about Harry, about _this_ with Harry, is that Eggsy doesn’t have to explain. Harry smiles just a little, and reaches for Eggsy’s overwarm hand from under his pillow and kisses his knuckles, one by one.

“Nor can I.”

Eggsy shakes his head a little, because while Harry understands him, he doesn’t, not really. _Can’t_ really. Because the fact of Harry is a marvel, but the idea of Harry with Eggsy, wanting Eggsy, feeling a scrap of what Eggsy feels for him, that… _that_ —

“How, I mean, I,” Eggsy stumbles over words, because it’s just unfathomable. It shouldn’t be real.

He’s still terrified, too often, that none of this is real.

“Luck, I suppose,” Harry breathes out idly, and then glances up at Eggsy, all coy through his lashes; “Unfinished business, perhaps.”

And Harry’s a legend among the legendary for a reason; Eggsy’s _heart’s_ set on him for a bloody fucking _reason_.

He sees what everyone else misses.

And Eggsy doesn’t fight the urge to lean into Harry’s touch when that broad hand cups his cheek; if he can’t make eye-contact, then Eggsy can damn well savour the feel, skin down to the bones.

“Eggsy?” Harry prompts, soft and still and open in a way that Eggsy can fall into without hesitation, without wondering whether he’ll survive when he meets the bottom.

“I didn’t mean,” he starts, but his throat’s still tight; he clears it half-heartedly. “I,” and still, no use: he’s too far gone, now, and so tired, and so overwhelmed and sometimes it’s just too much, y’know? Sometimes he needs to let the sleeping dogs fuckin’ _lie_ , and let the coulda-beens die off where they deserve to.

He wonders, idly, if he’ll ever manage that one. If he’ll ever reach a point where he makes it happen, where he gets it done.

“Forget it,” he shrugs, and leans further into Harry, lets his weight become momentum and aims to curve himself to Harry’s prone frame and maybe sleep, now. Maybe put his head to Harry’s chest and put all the things he can’t say or shake back to sleep, too.

“Eggsy, look at me.”

Of course, it’s not that fuckin’ easy.

And Eggsy tries to hide against Harry’s neck, against Harry’s side, against the dark that’s just not _dark_ enough but it’s a wash, fuckin’ hell: he can’t hide from Harry. And in his heart of hearts, he’s never _really_ wanted to.

Even as he knows that, soon as Harry looks at him proper, Harry’ll know. Harry _sees_.

And Eggsy’s so _tired_ ; he can’t keep the truth from his own eyes.

“Oh,” Harry breathes, reading him—predictably—like a fucking book. “Oh my dear.”

And now both of Harry’s hands reach out to frame his face, to pull him close and kiss his brow: impossibly intimate, the way he holds there and breathes in and Eggsy trembles for him, because he can’t help it; choke a sob for it, because he don’t want to help any of it, anymore. 

“God,” Harry murmurs, straight up against Eggsy’s skin. “You're brilliant, aren’t you, my darling, but you're really quite thick,” and it ain’t an insult at all, somehow, for the way Harry says it, all marveling and wonder and all the things that are pointing the wrong way, just now: that are meant for Eggsy to turn toward Harry, not the other way ‘round.

“After everything, _everything_ ,” Harry strokes thumbprints up and down Eggsy’s cheeks as he pulls back and stares deep into him, through him right and true. 

“You still have no sense of your worth, do you?"

Eggsy would look away, would hide from everything that gaze makes him feel because it’s so much, too much and yet everything he wants and that’s the point, ain’t it? Ain’t that the point that Eggsy’s not _worth_ —

“Oh my _dear_ heart,” Harry exhales, heartbreak seeping from his expression and it kills Eggsy to the core of it, it hurts down deep where his heart starts every beat. 

“Eggsy, darling,” Harry leans, and kisses him gentle, with all the love that Eggsy dreamed the world could hold, let alone what he’d ever thought he’d get a taste of in a hundred, million years. 

“I never needed a bullet to take the life from me,” Harry tells him, confesses, almost, and Eggsy doesn’t quite understand. “That deed was done long before,” and Eggsy doesn’t know when, or how, but he thinks he understands the feeling, a little. Maybe.

He knows what it’s like to walk around without really living.

“And you.”

Eggsy blinks again, when Harry’s expression starts to soften, to lighten, to look at him like he’s the sun, or maybe the air.

“The wanting of you, first,” Harry mouths at the corner of Eggsy’s lips. “And then the needing of _you_ , my love,” and Harry’s breath shivers, trembles from his lungs as he bows his head and breathes Eggsy in from the crook of his neck, the pounding of his heart that moves the skin as Harry murmurs into the beat:

“ _You_ brought me to life again.”

And maybe Eggsy’s heard him wrong. Maybe it really is still a dream.

Harry must feel the hesitance in him, the question, because he slides back up and kisses Eggsy with a burning kind of desperation that _hurts_ , in ways that dreams can hold.

Eggsy might break in two, he thinks. Or maybe he’ll never break again.

He can’t be sure.

“You’re everything, Harry,”Eggsy breathes, pants, moans against those lips; “and I don’t know how to, how to prove—”

“You prove nothing,” Harry bites out, hisses like he’s demanding it of the whole world. “You owe nothing,” he reaches, gathers Eggsy’s hands in his own: a promise. A testament to something Eggsy doesn’t know the name of, only how it feels as it builds between his lungs.

“You earn nothing,” Harry says, squeezes his hands tight. “You are precious in ways I can’t describe. Your presence in my life is miraculous, your heat beside me, here, your heart given is a mystery. My own received is, is,” he takes their tangled hands and presses them to that heart as he mouths more than breathes, disbelieving save for touch:  
“It is beyond _reckoning_.”

And Eggsy still isn’t entirely familiar with the feeling that follows: the warmth in his chest that gets bounced around for the flipping of his heart, the rise of joy like water as a thing he’s not supposed to get, not supposed to touch, not meant to ever know except it’s all he knows at all; Eggsy’s not sure what to do with it. Doesn’t know whether to believe that it can stay, that it stands as a real thing. A steady thing.

But then Harry’s hands press tighter, and Harry’s touch is steady. And the beat of _his_ heart is steady, too.

So, maybe.

“You are worth more than the world, Eggsy.” 

_Maybe_.

“To me, you are worth more than the world.”

Eggsy’s eyes sting when he tilts his head to kiss Harry’s lips, to breathe him in as deep as anything in the whole of existence, and fucking hell: if this ain’t real?

“Never question that,” Harry speaks into his mouth, wraps arms around him now, draws him close to fight for space where their chests collide for gapsing; “Never forget that.”

And if this ain’t real, then fuck. _Fuck_. 

Eggsy don’t ever wanna know.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com).


End file.
